MIT's chip provides cryptographic authentication to thwart the counterfeit wired device chargers

Counterfeit chargers are a major threat that gadgets of many companies are facing severely. Apple in late 2016 reported that 90 out of 100 Apple chargers sold on Amazon are counterfeit.

In the same time, Britain’s Chartered Trading Standards Institute reported in their safety tests that of 400 counterfeit chargers it bought from a range of online retailers, 397 failed a basic safety test. These conditions clearly explain the severity of the counterfeit chargers in the retail market.

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Nowadays, wireless chargers for portable gadgets are available in the market and these too face the problem of counterfeit.  In an effort to get ahead of the problem of counterfeit wireless chargers which could cause power surges that fry a device’s circuitry, MIT university has found a solution. Researchers from MIT university have built a chip that blocks the attempts to wirelessly charge a device’s battery unless the charger first provides cryptographic authentication.

The same technology also solves another problem with wireless chargers. When two devices share a single charger, if they are different distances from the charger’s electrical coil, their charging rates can vary enormously, to the extent that one device might charge fully while the other remains virtually uncharged. In the same way that the researchers’ chip can block power transfer from an unauthorized charger, it can slow the power transfer to a device nearer the charging coil, ensuring more equitable charge rates. 

“Security is one of the most critical issues in the ‘internet of things [IoT],’” says Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, referring to the popular idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock will soon have sensors that report information directly to networked servers. “We will see security functionality embedded into virtually every function and component of an IoT node.”